About the Author

Raymond W. Baker, founding president of Global Financial Integrity, is a businessman, author, and internationally respected authority on corruption, money laundering, and foreign policy issues.

Baker’s international business career began in 1961 in Nigeria, where he owned an investment company that bought and built manufacturing and financing ventures, two of which became Harvard Business School case studies. In 1976, Baker returned to the United States and founded a trading company doing business in dozens of countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. For more than a decade, he advised on confidential economic matters at the presidential level for developing country governments. His consulting work focused principally on anticorruption strategies, international terms of trade, and developing country debt.

These business and consulting experiences revealed practices, both legal and illegal, that funnel money out of poorer countries into richer countries. In 1990 Baker undertook an in-depth survey of this issue, interviewing 550 business-people in 11 countries on import and export mispricing, tax-evading capital flows, and money laundering. He received a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1996 to continue his research and associated as a guest scholar in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. Baker traveled to 23 countries to interview 335 central bankers, commercial bankers, government officials, economists, lawyers, tax collectors, security officers, and sociologists on the relationships between bribery, commercial tax evasion, money laundering, and economic growth. This project culminated in his first book, Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System, cited by the Financial Times as one of the “best business books of 2005.”

Together with Tom Cardamone, Baker founded Global Financial Integrity (GFI) in 2006 to broaden international understanding of issues surrounding harmful economic practices. GFI coined the term “illicit financial flows,” now used by virtually all countries and international institutions and embedded into the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The GFI team has produced dozens of economic analyses of how resource transfers affect countries around the world. A 2009 analysis focusing on Africa led to formation of the High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows from Africa, on which Baker has served since its inception, under the able leadership of Thabo Mbeki and Abdalla Hamdok.

Across long years of writing and speaking, Baker has testified often before legislative committees in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. He has commented frequently on global news outlets, including ABC’s Nightline, Bloomberg TV, the CBS Evening News, CNN, NPR, PBS, BBC, and Al Jazeera.

Baker is a graduate of Harvard Business School and Georgia Institute of Technology. He earlier served on the Policy Advisory Board of Transparency International–USA and on the Advisory Board of the Ethical Research Institute. His wife, Pauline, a political scientist, is the creator of the Fragile States Index and president emeritus of the Fund for Peace. They live in Bethesda, Maryland. Their daughter Gayle lives with her family in Washington, D.C., and their son Deren and his family are in San Francisco. This book is dedicated to Pauline and Raymond’s grandchildren, as said in the book’s dedication, “their friends, and their generation, again the best reason for optimism.”